Word: rossen
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Moviemaker Rossen, a short, chunky man of 41, is also expert at a harsher realism: the art of getting your own way in Hollywood. By combining talent with a tough-mindedness born of his rough & tumble boyhood on Manhattan streets, Rossen has won the scenaristis goal of controlling his own picture right through to the final editing...
Scripter-Director-Producer Robert Rossen's efforts to keep Stark from being a facsimile of the late Huey Long often turn the character into a colorless man who lacks the political charm of a people's favorite and looks like a cross between a schoolteacher and a gangster. But when Actor Crawford is allowed to swing around in the role, he has some fine scenes-notably, the seedy politico resting off a nightlong drunk in a playground swing, gesturing the children to go off and leave him alone...
...newfangled techniques which Director Rossen seems to have borrowed from the modern Italian directors have given the movie vitality and power. Since it was shot outdoors in all sorts of weather, the film credibly suggests the passing of time simply because no two scenes show the same sky or lighting. The camera, often threading through Stark's career like a fond mamma looking for her child in a crowd, turns up all kinds of unpredictable and realistic touches. Occasionally, Director Rossen plunges spiritedly into a scene as though, in the Rossellini manner, he were making up the script...
...away from Hollywood's familiar faces, Scripter-Director-Producer Robert Rossen filmed most of his picture in Stockton, Calif, (pop. 66,000), casting townsfolk in all but the principal roles. He used a railroad brakeman as Pa Stark, the city's sheriff as the sheriff, a local preacher as the preacher. In the big crowd scene just before Willie Stark's assassination, he turned four cameras loose at once on Stockton's non-professional extras to get their unrehearsed reactions to Crawford's speech...
...words flew around the table between scholars, actors, technicians, a critic, a moviegoer, and some of the best U.S. moviemaking talent: 20th Century-Fox's Mankiewicz, M-G-M Production Chief Dore Senary, Warner's Jerry Wald, Independents John Huston, Hal B. Wallis and Robert Rossen...